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Silicon Milkroundabout: Forget the banks, come and join a London startup
- ladon86 15y agoYes, this is what's needed. I like the line about the banks. My biggest peeve with the UK scene is that we lose so much talent to banks and consultancies, especially among graduates; anything to turn that around is a step in the right direction.
- drtse4 15y agoIs this the first event of this kind in the UK? If it is kudos to the organizers, would really love to see something similar where i live (Italy, startup environment not mature enough yet, maybe in a few years).
- c3m 15y agoHard figures - more than half of the graduates from one of the top technical universities in the UK (Imperial) go to work for banks (computer scientists that is). The reason is that they pay quite a bit more than most software houses do. Notable exceptions include Google which usually can match the starting salaries but otherwise, you're pretty much guaranteed to earn less. The bottom line is that after several years of student life, a relatively high salary looks compelling and coupled with student loans to pay off, the choice is quite clear at this particular moment for the majority of people.
- ThomPete 15y agoThanks for the info (didn't know this) Isn't there something inherently wrong with society when an industry that provides little value to society make so much money that they can afford to pay better than anyone else?
- JonWood 15y agoYes, there is certainly something wrong with it, but for some reason the entire country is effectively owned by the banking industry at the moment (despite the fact the country in fact owns a good chunk of the banking industry). Personally I'd quite like to see the government actually tax them at decent rates, and call the bluff that they're all going to up and leave if they have to contribute to the country. The chances of that happening when the current government all made a fortune in investment and banking careers is low though.
- gaius 15y agoI don't know where you get that "little value to society" nonsense from. Asset allocation is a non-trivially hard problem, and the alternative to doing it our way is Five Year Plans and the like, which tend to result - and this is actual, historical fact - in tens of millions of people starving.
- wazzles 15y agoYea it's definitely a non trivial problem to rip people off with as much success as the likes of Goldman. IBs are completely socially useless, excessively criminal, and for the most part just exploit clients through front-running etc. I used to work for one, now I work for a startup that actually makes stuff. Happy days.
- ThomPete 15y agoYou seem to be confusing what is difficult with what is beneficial to society. But if how hard a problem is would be an indication of how beneficial then there are plenty of jobs that is grossly underpaid. You also seem to be assuming that there can be only two possible solutions to this problem. But please don't let your strawmen be my burden.
- gaius 15y agoNo - my point is that countries that have sophisticated financial services industries have historically been extremely unlikely to make catastropic errors of asset allocation resulting in famine, etc. If we had a group - let's call it The Party - deciding what to invest where, and they ballsed it up, then you get the Great Leap Forward (30M starving to death is half the population of the UK).
- whyleyc 15y ago"an industry that provides little value to society" Whilst this is a nice popular statement to trot out in the current climate, it is simply not true, at least not in fiscal terms. Some facts: * The financial services industry accounted for 10% of GDP in 2009 * It provides 4% of total employment in the UK (1 million jobs) * It contributes 28% of the UK’s total exports of services * It contributed £53.4bn in tax in 2009/10 (11% of total government receipts) Much as everyone would like to say "sod the bankers, let them go elsewhere", the truth is doing so would likely torpedo the economy. Source: http://217.154.230.218/NR/rdonlyres/E01CD45A-053F-4C9B-BDAA-2E16CF668268/0/BC_RS_ContributionofFinancialServicesintheUK.pdf http://217.154.230.218/NR/rdonlyres/E01CD45A-053F-4C9B-BDAA-...
- wazzles 15y agoUm, nice try. Takes a lot of 50 billions to add up to 1.5 trillion. Especially when you include interest. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8262037/Bank-bail-out-adds-1.5-trillion-to-debt.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...
- whyleyc 15y agoYou're assuming two things here: (1) The country would have been better off financially not to bail the banks out and let them burn (2) The nationalised banks won't end up turning a profit for taxpayers in the long run anyway Both of which could be considered shaky assumptions. See Robert Peston's analysis on this very topic for more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/03/can_taxpayers_profit_from_nort.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/03...
- ThomPete 15y agoThe day that the banks choose to bail out it's customers I might consider changing my opinioin about the value the provide to society. (not saying that they don't provide any)
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- Nrsolis 15y agoThom, if you're so convinced that the financial industry provides so little benefit to modern society, why don't you try and live in a country without one. The Great Depression in the US (which effectively wiped out a significant portion of the financial industry here) was the source of much misery and pain. Pick up a book on bond valuation and capital allocation and tell me if YOU would like to do that work for yourself. Finance is hard won and specialized knowledge. Don't dismiss that expertise.
- ThomPete 15y agoWhy the strawman? I never said it wasn't of any value. I have repeatedly clarified that I am talking in the context of this article and about certain parts of the financial industry, namely the part can afford to pay better than anyone else. The developers working on your average netbank aren't in question here their salaries are not extreme. All I am saying is that the kind of developers that the OP is talking about are being lost to parts of the financial industry that aren't providing value to society but primarily to themselves and I find that problematic. That has nothing to do with my view of other parts of the banking industry.
- Nrsolis 15y agoThey aren't being "lost" to the financial industry. They are proving "value" to the consumers of those (valuable) services. You could make the same argument for home health care workers and cardiac nurses. Potential home health care workers aren't "lost" to the nursing industry. Society VALUES what they provide to a greater degree because it compensates them more. You seem to be laboring under the assumption that a career in the financial services industry is a guarantee of high-income. The truth is quite different. Life in the financial services industry has its own downsides (insecurity of income, long hours, poor working conditions generally) which you seem to be glossing over to make your argument. On my last flight to Mountain View, I sat next to a guy who left a job at Goldman Sachs (as a broker) to go do ad sales for Google. His reason: better working conditions and quality of life. Don't assume that your choices are everyone else's. The high pay in the financial services industry is there because the work is hard and few people can or are willing to do it.
- vixen99 15y agoThat's great for the graduates who get these jobs but can I add that it seems to me that there's precious little evidence (actually none at all) that their skills result in any kind of improvement in the service offered to the millions of ordinary customers of the monopolized banking industry in Britain.As far as I can see there's been a marked decline.
- adaml_623 15y agoThat's because the graduates don't go and work for the retail arms of the big banks. They work in the investment and trading arms and generally have very little to do with customers. Many of the Banks don't even have retail arms. And that's not even thinking about Hedge Funds, Brokerages and other Financial institutions that are normally grouped into 'the banking industry'
- gaius 15y agoReally? Do you queue in your branch still, or use the website? Remember if you have an ISA or a pension you are "the stock market"...
- vixen99 15y agoI spend a lot of time abroad so my experience is almost entirely of internet transactions. I have no complaints about counter service when I use it. Decline in service? One small example: the website has been revamped so now I have no print option for my credit card (as supplied by the same bank) account. I am forced to copy-paste details from the site which they seem to have arranged to make as tricky as possible. The old ‘print account’ option has gone. I did wonder if statistically this might mean that enough folk would make mistakes in repayment to the bank's advantage in interest payments. But that's just my rotten suspicious mind. I mean - as if a bank would ever stoop so low!
- c3m 15y agoYou're absolutely correct. Think of it like this - if you're paying a lot of money to get the top people, you'll want to use their brains. Simply put, retail banking does not provide comparable returns on investment than putting the people into hedge funds, trading, etc. You have to bear in mind that banks (from my personal experience and from my peers) are first and foremost profit oriented, which effectively guides their decisions. Hence, you'll not see those people working on things that directly impact retail customers.
- tomh- 15y agoI'm curious, whats the avarage starting salary at a financial company in london? Sometimes I see salaries of 23k-25k pound per year (for other software companies) from which you can barely afford an appartment for yourself in London.
- dmitri1981 15y agoaround £35k+bonus for dev at decent bank.
- wazzles 15y agoyup 35 - 40k starting, 50 to 60k after a few years, over 100k possible after 5 (top tier IB)
- JonoW 15y agoAs a bit of a finger in the air estimate from looking at job ads here, I would probably estimate that a London finance company will pay about 50% more than a "normal" company. Not sure what a starting salary would be, but I would bet it would be > 30k. After 5 years you would probably be on > 60k, but if you're quite specialist (in terms of finance based skills) you could be earning much more.
- c3m 15y agoWorking for Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and the lot, starting salaries for Imperial graduates are upwards of £40k (definitely know people who are starting at £50k). You're correct, £25k seems to be a ballpark figure for software houses. Looking at it statistically, average salary for Imperial graduates is something like £35k, so you can do the math and infer what the top grads are earning.
- eroded 15y agoPaying £25k (~$40k USD) for grad devs in London is a bit cheeky, when you consider the living costs are higher than in Silicon Valley (http://tinyurl.com/6e8d3th http://tinyurl.com/6e8d3th). Clearly, UK students enjoy selling their soul to live in bedsits eating noodles :-)
- singular 15y agoI went to Imperial (did CivEng) and I can confirm this, lecturers even joked about it. At one point the people in the class who were actually going to go into engineering were asked to raise their hands - around 1/3 did. To digress briefly, part of the reason the City likes Imperial so much is that they work you into the ground. If you can survive Imperial then you're likely to do well under city-levels of pressure.
- gaius 15y agoThe truth is in the UK the only industry paying a decent wage for technical work (not just CS grads, but engineering, physics, maths, etc) is banking. I am a Mech Eng graduate and my CV has been floating around in various databases for years, and I still get recruiters calling me and offering less than half of my current salary (and I'm no rockstar, just an ordinary worker) to go and work on something mechanical for a big engineering company. It really is a joke. This is all tied up in the vestiges of the class system, technical people are still thought of as "blue collar" (despite being better educated than most white collar workers) and the management class will never pay us fairly - except in banking where they are quite clear about what is worth what. I gather in the US it's different, they don't have all that baggage holding them back.
- lucraft 15y agoNot sure about class, perhaps developers just are more valuable to banks than startups. Otherwise it sounds right. However I'm sure I would have gone stir crazy with boredom by now if I worked in a bank :) (I have low boredom tolerance)
- stuartd 15y agoWebsense has categorised your site as 'Potentially Damaging Content' - you might want to get that changed.
- deathwarmedover 15y agoThanks for the report btw, we got it recategorised to "Job Search". :)
- stuartd 15y agoReally? It's now categorized under 'Malicious Web Sites'..
- adaml_623 15y agoThat's an awesome list of companies. There are a few missing from that front page who I hope are still around on the day.
- fsipie 15y agoI'd like to present a different perspective. I've worked at 3 startups in the past, including one of my own. None of which had much financial success and 1 of which cheated me out of several thousand pounds. Though it's been interesting, in the sense of the chinese proverb, I sometimes wish that I'd just worked at a bank for the past 15 years.
- adaml_623 15y agoTell us more!
- swombat 15y agoThough it's been interesting, in the sense of the chinese provert, I sometimes wish that I'd just worked at a bank for the past 15 years. I can understand that. I worked at a big consulting company, at a global bank client, for 4 years. From personal experience, however, I'd like to correct your perception a little. 1) Yes, the money is better and more regular, but you end up spending a lot more as well. So you won't make as much as you think you will. 2) While you constantly hear about people making astounding sums of money in banking, the reality is that unless you work your socks off and are lucky to be in the right place at the right time (hey, that sounds like startups!) you will stagnate at a decent but not particularly amazing salary. And if you work your socks off, you won't have that much time to enjoy the money anyway. 3) This extra money comes with a cost: your soul. I'm not kidding. If you're the kind of person who derives great satisfaction from loving your work and making a difference, working at a large corporation for a long period will slowly but surely strangle and kill something very precious inside of you. Money is a commodity. Enjoying your life, doing something you love, feeling like you make a difference - you can't buy those things, no matter your salary.
- joeconway 15y agoI've just registered. I'm on one of the better CS courses I get the impression from my peers that most of them want to go work for big organisations and consider the idea of working for a startup as unthinkable. I think thats such a shame
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- wyclif 15y agoWhat's also a shame is that these UK companies don't allow remote work. I think lots of US devs would be interested, and since visas are capped anyway remote seems rather obvious.
- tomstuart 15y agoIs there any indication of what kind of event this will be? Is it a conventional recruitment fair? A party?
- robfitz 15y agoIt's at a nice big pub with fancy beer and a stage for live music, so I'd guess it's a social event plus the companies introducing themselves from the stage so you know who to focus your mingling on.
- calpaterson 15y agoHmmm...as a graduate I really don't know how to equip myself at these kind of events. I wonder how I should go about fixing that
- JonWood 15y agoThere's not a huge amount you need to do. It might be worth having a look at the sites of some of the companies listed so that you know vaguely who you want to talk to, but other then that, just turn up and make sure you have some way of taking down contact details for people - a pen and a notepad are probably your best option, unless you're particularly good at typing on a mobile phone keyboard. The important bit is to talk to people once you get there, since it's unlikely that people are going to come and seek you out in the corner.
- upthedale 15y agoGreat idea. Will there be later events? I ask because the exam season is currently in full swing for some students who may be otherwise interested.
- beck5 15y agoThis is true, I live in Sheffield so attending means at minimum 1 valuable day lost in crunch time at uni so not sure if it is worth the risk....... booking train ticket tonight then.
- adaml_623 15y agoSince there is no contact info on the website. Can I just ask why you want a URL for me?? :-) You say you won't share my email address but what are you doing with my other private info? I mean this only because I'm actually curious and I'm trying to work out which URL to give... Hackernews profile page??
- wyclif 15y agoI'm in the US and would love to go to this, because if I had an offer and help with visa issues I'd move to the UK in a heartbeat. Unfortunately I can't afford the airfare.
- hcho 15y agoI doubt any startup will be able to arrange you a work visa at the moment. Non EU worker visas are severly capped these days and the available is taken up by bigger companies.
- earnubs 15y agoHi, I've worked in a couple of startups & agencies around the British Isles and one investment bank in London. My experience would convince me to advise that you should work were you want to work, but in general my experience is: 1) if money is the prime motivator, work for investment banks, preferably as a contractor; 2) if you want a breadth of experience, work in a good web design agency; 3) if deep domain knowledge is what you want, work in a startup. (Of course, you can't do the contracting without a few years experience in any of the above.) The points are all a generalisation but this final one is not, it's not what you are doing, how much you are getting paid or where you are doing it, it's who you are doing it with. The human factor is, in the long run, the most important thing. Are they smart? Good, you'll get smart too. Are the decent human beings? Good, you'll live a long life. Humans: the cause of, and solution to, all life's problems :)
- raarky 15y agoJust wanted to back this comment up. I'm in the same boat - I've contracted at various companies(financial, media, etc etc) and currently working at a startup. Contract at large companies if you want money. Join a startup if you want lifestyle & scene. Remember tho, if you work at bank you can still go to some of the many events the scene puts on :)
- flondon 15y agoThe interesting discourse here is why graduates find the big IBs/Consultancies so appealing, more so that joining a startup. In my opinion, this is due to the perception that a high flying blue-chip career gives - 99.9% of graduates would prefer to say ‘I work for Goldmans’ rather than ‘I’m going to work for an unknown technology startup around Shoreditch’ - this impresses grandma and the parents who have subbed the £30-40 university costs for their kids. I think the counter to this is that within the UK, there is a dearth of success stories involving young tech entrepreneurs - the big one that sticks in my mind is the million-dollar-pixel guy, who as the name suggests made a million! (There are of course others, but I've not seen them as widely covered in the media) Looking at the example of silicon valley, there are so many examples of tech entrepreneurs making it big at a young age - maybe once the London scene has a healthier number of well known (i.e. the Daily Mail writes about it) exits, the perception will improve and we will see a higher number of bright graduates preferring to join a startup.
- IsaacL 15y agoI think impressing the other students is a big factor as well. It's alternately humorous and depressing to hear the way people talk about their mate who got an internship at Goldman/Deutschbank/wherever. I guess if you've been pushed all the way through 6th form to get into the most prestigious university you can, once you arrive at said uni you'll soon go looking for the next big shiny famous institution. (That said, it seems the one employer that's even more impressive than an I-Bank is Google - but Google isn't a startup anymore. I wonder how many UK grads would happily join a company that might become the next Google?) Anyway, I've long been a do-what-makes-you-happy-not-what-other-people-think-is-high-status kind of guy, but I think I'd still find it difficult working for a startup in London while encountering people who are my age, half as smart but earning twice as much. For that reason, my post-graduation plans involve me leaving the small, charming and damp island of my birth altogether... And taking an even bigger salary cut for the chance to live in the most exciting country on the planet, China.
- timthorn 15y agoDon't know about IBs, but consultancies offer the chance to work across a real range of clients and industries, and in a variety of roles. The ability to do something fresh on a fairly regular basis but without changing employers is appealing to certain minds.
- cfelde 15y agoIf you want to go into "banking" (and have the skills needed), but would prefer a startup then maybe opengamma would be interesting: http://www.opengamma.com/ http://www.opengamma.com/
- will_critchlow 15y agoIs there any way for other companies hiring devs in London to throw our weight behind this?
- djhworld 15y agoThis sounds like a good afternoon. I'm going to a gig in the evening too. I've been looking for something like this for a while, I've always wondered how people get recruited into startups without 'being in the know' as it were. When you look at job aggregators 99% of the jobs are for huge corporates, usually through the proxy of a recruitment agency. My only concern about this event, for me personally anwyay, is I graduated 3 years ago and I've been working professionally as a developer as soon as I left University. I'm not sure if this event is aimed at people like me or fresh out of uni grads or not.
- adaml_623 15y ago"Fresh out of uni, or looking for your next move?"
- lucraft 15y agoYep, definitely come along.
- intranation 15y agoAt a senior employee at one of the companies hosting (Smarkets), I can say that we would welcome any and all interested developers to the event. Being fresh out of uni is certainly not a requirement!
- joeconway 15y agoI'm thinking of going even though I'm not graduating until next year. Would you be interested in meeting people who aren't immediately available but are looking to get familiar with the scene?
- JonnieCache 15y agoWhether they're interested in meeting you or not, if you turn up and start talking to them they won't have much of a choice in the matter.
- samengland 15y agoFor an event appealing to those "fresh out of uni" it's very badly timed. Most of us are still in exams, but only until the end of May. It should have been scheduled at least a couple of weeks later.
- rbanffy 15y agoDid banks book up all good venues in that period? ;-)
- softbuilder 15y agoWhat's with the milk?
- thomson 15y agoMilk used to be home-delivered in Britain--the act of companies touring universities to attract recent grads to apply is known informally as a milkround.
- dogonwheels 15y agoUsed to be? Don't tell that to my milkman! :) I still get milk and eggs (and sometimes some pretty bad knock-off Irn Bru) from ours. We're in the semi-countryside just outside of Leeds, and it's not at all unusual around here. Wonderful service!
- dunk010 15y agoI think that it's some combination of a milk round being a boring and repetitive job (for those who have to go between all the universities) and some sort of youth/milk imagery. I think it's anachronistic as the only person I have ever heard refer to it in that way is my Dad.
- lucraft 15y agoThe Milkround is a jobs fair for big corporations that goes round all the universities in the UK every year. http://www.milkround.com/ http://www.milkround.com/
- deathwarmedover 15y agoI was going to pass this discussion onto my friend who is doing dev contract work at a bank, but then I remembered he's not allowed onto anything on the internet while he's at work, LOL.
- kierank 15y agoThis event shouldn't just be about joining a startup in my opinion. It should also be about how graduates should start a startup. Also the location in Shoreditch may put off some of the hardcore tech people. It would have also been nice to see some more hardware startups but you're probably going to have to go to Cambridge or Berkshire for those.
- ropiku 15y agoI think payment is still an issue with startups. Hopefully that changed but last year I interviewed with a couple of startups (some of them on this list) for summer internships and possibly remote work and was offered £1k/month in London.
- ig1 15y agoThe problem is that it's too late, most of the banks and consultancies finish hiring in Jan-Feb, many of the big tech firms will have finished by now as well. Most of the good undergraduates will have already accepted offers, so this is actually coming too late for them.
- ayers 15y agoJust a quick question on attire, am I correct in presuming this is a casual event and therefore we should not dress up like we would for an interview?
- andytwigg 15y agoHi all, Acunu (http://www.acunu.com/jobs http://www.acunu.com/jobs) will be here - if you're interested in algorithms and file systems or just a great hacker, come and find us! Say hello at jobs@acunu.com
- rorohello 15y agoHi All, I hope the Milkroundabout Folks don't mind me piggybacking on this post (I applied to come to their event, but didn't get in :( I'd like to let everyone interested in mobile apps know about another networking event OPEN TO ALL on May 31st (Tuesday Night, 7-10pm) at El Paso EC1V 9NQ, just across the street from Bar Music Hall. The event is an official PechaKucha http://www.pecha-kucha.org/events/pknapp http://www.pecha-kucha.org/events/pknapp and we have some great presenters lined up so far from INQ Mobile, TurnedOnDigital (makers of The Situationist), Quipper and more. You can register to attend here: http://www.amiando.com/WZJZCJU.html http://www.amiando.com/WZJZCJU.html Ryan Sommer Director, MaintainPR ryan@maintainpr.com